It was “a bit like remedy, which I’ve by no means achieved,” famend chef Jamie Oliver says of his expertise on Netflix’s Chef’s Desk: Legends. “It was in all probability lengthy overdue.”
The Netflix docuseries consists of 4 episodes, every spotlighting a special culinary icon, with Oliver being featured alongside José Andrés, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters. The roughly 50-minute episode dives into Oliver’s tv beginnings with The Bare Chef and follows his journey from novice cooking present host to mentor to activist.
“Early in my profession, don’t ask me why — I used to be genius or mad — however I began making all of my content material. I arrange a manufacturing firm as a chef that didn’t know what he was doing,” Oliver tells THR. “I’ve all the time been in management, and that is the primary time after I’ve been in no management,” he provides of filming the docuseries, which required him to be retrospective, calling it out as one thing “this system needed me to do.”
Having been full-on for the previous 25 years, wanting again isn’t one thing Oliver has made time for. Of spending 12 hours chatting for the documentary, he jokes, “My ass was positively sore. I don’t sit down a lot.”
The present’s director, Brian McGinn, proved to be fairly much like the chef, Oliver discovered after their 10 days collectively. However one in every of McGinn’s largest challenges, a minimum of in Oliver’s eyes, was unraveling his packed profession. “I felt sorry for him, actually,” Oliver says. “I had a lot previous content material for him to undergo.”
Oliver says he’s happy with his Chef’s Desk: Legends episode, which covers a number of elements of his life, together with his dedication to training, whether or not it’s by means of his former restaurant Fifteen — which educated younger adults from deprived backgrounds — or his collection Jamie’s Faculty Dinners, which confirmed the chef’s devoted marketing campaign to providing nutritious but nonetheless tasty college meals to youngsters within the U.Okay. Nonetheless, he says the episode was simply the “tip of the iceberg” of his profession.
Jamie Oliver on Chef’s Desk: Legends: “Youngsters must be linked with meals in order that they will … be happier, more healthy and stay extra productive lives.”
Courtesy of Netflix
Whereas his efforts so far have centered closely on the U.Okay., Oliver, who hails from Essex, England, feels it’s vital work that may be achieved elsewhere within the Western world. “Each story I’ve informed within the U.Okay. has been related within the U.S.,” he says. “We’re so completely different, however we’re so related, and we each could be blessed in so some ways to stay within the nations that we stay in with the alternatives that we’ve got.”
The docuseries’ message is a common one, Oliver notes, in that meals and nourishing oneself is all the time vital. “We’ve created all this content material, and we’ll proceed to do this free of charge,” he says of his collection. “British and American youngsters deserve and must be linked with meals in order that they will have decisions once they turn out to be younger adults and could be happier, more healthy and stay longer, extra productive lives.”
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone concern of The Hollywood Reporter journal. To obtain the journal, click here to subscribe.